Capitalism is the most godaw... oh, wait, this is about managing you kingdom? Ah!

Ok, so here's a guide for those of you confident enough and willing to restart for another profile, to help you grind out those locker and veto slots. Well, help in terms of the money haul not gameplay difficulty. It's experimental, but parts of it have been tested allready. It's long winded and repetitive, but I'm being indulgent and ultimately harmless. (And uneasy about advocating silly approaches to kingdom management because of what happened the last time I did that).

What you do before you restart the whole entire game is make sure to remember exactly how you managed to beat Gaan'Telet purist (the "end" quest). You need to be able to do it with a bare minimum of unlocks, with, say, a dwarven rogue or a human monk or somesuch. Not silly potions, either! The lowest you can go in terms of unlocks, the better (though you can unlock whatever you want, really, and having all the gods unlocked is probably a good idea).

What you do then is restart and do the intro dungeons unlocking whatever. I'm talking about the very first three dungeons, and not Den of Danger, Venture Cave and Hobblers Hold - you don't want to do those unless really, really, REALLY necessary.

What you do next is do the directional dungeons and visit the subdungeons looking for stuff to unlock - races, gods and such. You want to pick up all the throphies as fast as you can. The fewer runs you do, the better, and under no circumstances do a Hobbler's Hold run. Keep your runs in the first "outer" ring of dungeons to a bare minimum and just get those throphies. Possibly consider doing the bank and bazzar upgrades so you can upgrade other stuff along the way.

Once you've got all of them (and some can be tricky, but if you've got all the gods, not that tricky), "Beat the game" by doing a purist run of Gaan'Telet and stabilize your prices. This will also unlock the PQI and the Flaming Dungeons, and many, many quests. What you have then is THE GAME. Most dungeons will be uncompleted, most quests too, and the PQI and the flaming dungeons will set your objectives and give you lots of money for every run you do (even more with the "bet on boss" prep).

If you can pull it off, you'll be hauling 500+ gold on every run when the flaming dungeon or the PQI send you to the easy dungeons - VC, DoD and HH and the first ring of drectionals. Don't chase badges unless PQI sayes so - as long as you don't have full completion there's a chance you'll be sent to a dungeon. Chase badges in the dungeons you DON'T want to be doing anyway. Every time a dungeon with a quest in it becomes flaming, do the quest - eventually the quests will be completed and you'll get your flaming dungeon gold, too.

Also, as soon as you feel confident with your unlocks (do puzzles/class challenges and stuff) work your way to unlocking all the classess (monsters, exploration, etc). More classess, more 500+ gold runs in easy dungeons. As soon as you find tinker, unlock everything that unlocks through subdungeons - classess, races, gods, whathave you.

Last couple of playthroughs I explored the early game for balancing purposes and these kind of shennanigans I avoided on puropose, but on one playthrough I avoided Hobblers Hold by accident and only remembered it exists when it started turning up in the PQI. Every time that happened it was 500+ gold in a matter of minutes. So following that logic, the next time I restart, I'll try to do what I described here for 2 reasons - easy money on easy dungeons, and actually getting the feel of doing the game from scratch with the PQI and flaming dungeons turned on from the start. Plus, this way you get a lot more out of the PQI before it starts sending you off to Vicious dungeons.

This is probably the most efficent way of grinding gold in the game, by far.

EDIT: And once you open up the PQI you might want to practice what I call "badge avoidance" in the easy dungeons. Don't do more than the PQI sent you in there for, to leave more reasons for the PQI to send you back. This involves "sabotaging" badges except the one PQI wants. There's about 25+ reasons to be sent to hobblers, and that is 25X500 gold. You really don't want to waste any of it.

IMPORTANT BIT: Since the opening part of this strat is in fact the speedrun that the a dev said was interested in seeing done, if you could tape the "get all throphies ASAP + do Gaan'Telet" done part in form of a one piece speedrun, I guess at least he might appreciate it. Just a thought.

Excellent. So do we have a roadmap laying around as far as what's the quickest way to unlock X, where X is Rogue, Tikki Tooki, Bank upgrade 2, et cetera? I haven't committed all that to memory and your write-up here seems to suggest that's assumed.

Also, at what point during this, if at all, do you recommend doing bronze/silver class challenges? Are any/only specific ones worth doing up to a certain point? At all? Do you ever intentionally leave a Silver undone to keep the item out of shops for awhile?

Are there certain things you should avoid doing? Witch upgrades unless the dungeon is flaming, et cetera? Wouldn't unlocking Tinker ASAP be one of the best ideas? I'm not even sure what triggers his subdungeon. I know Crusader wants all the altars unlocked. Tinker seems fairly random, but I remember needing to ENDISWAL to get to him. Beyond that, I don't know what unlocks his subdungeon.

Class challenges, puzzles, all that are not detrimental, and are up to the individual player. If you're going for the speedrun for the sake of a speedrun, then no, don't do them. If you're just looking to set yourself up to rake in the swag that comes with flaming/PQI runs, then by, all means, do all the challenges as soon as you think you can - you're just playing the game. Any source of gold that doesn't up your completion of easy/enjoyable dungeons is fine and you can do as many as you can without being frustrated and use the gold on upgrades.

Same goes for everything else except:

Don't do easy/normal dungeons unless PQI is either there or somewhere you really don't want to go. And don't go chasing badges in them.

That's it. A roadmap for the speedrun was discussed by me, Darvin and Avatar, and the conclusion was sort of that there's nothing a pro can't beat with a dwarven rogue. A roadmap for everything else is up to how anyon in particular wants to play his game. The point is to not unlock the PQI with only the stuff you really don't want to do left for it to choose, and not waste the opportunity fo get extra flaming cash on the easier runs. That's pretty much it.

For the tinker you need to be in a dungeon which can spawn a secret subdungeon and then find it by destroying walls. I think he's an auto-spawn untill you find him after you upgrade... something (bazzar, bank, something). I'm not sure where to find him outside of easy dungeons though - some layouts spawn a secret subdungeon, some don't. If yo DO find him, scum up everything else, by all means. Or don't, it's up to you.

@OMN:

Q: Doesn't the PQI unlock before that point? I'm sure I was checking and ignoring it a while before I had burning dungeons available. A: yes, but the throphy prices are a mess. It unlocks when you collect all the throphies, or maybe one or two throphies away.

This just highlights what I consider to be a severe flaw in the reward system of the game. I know I need to farm 40000 gold for another locker slot, so I deliberately avoid doing runs with classes that I haven't (except the goatperson) so I don't start getting burning Vicious dungeons. So it's basically Wizard + Bet on Boss over and over and over in Hard/Normal dungeons until I get sick to death of it (I never actually unlocked the third locker slot or more than 1 veto slot on previous profiles, the grind is just too heavy).

As for PQI? LOL. First of all PQI in Hobblers Hold is a waste of time since you only get the quest gold; which means there's no reason to do HH over the burning dungeon pretty much ever. I would 100% HH as fast as possible if I was even going to consider doing PQIs for the money (which I wouldn't...) And 2nd, the badge requirements often make a swift victory problematic or downright difficult.

FDru wrote:As for PQI? LOL. First of all PQI in Hobblers Hold is a waste of time since you only get the quest gold; which means there's no reason to do HH over the burning dungeon pretty much ever. I would 100% HH as fast as possible if I was even going to consider doing PQIs for the money (which I wouldn't...) And 2nd, the badge requirements often make a swift victory problematic or downright difficult.

? Eh, what? You can prep any god for 10 gold. As long as the badge isn't purist or faithless, that alone is gong to win it for you in a very short order. You can prep GG and win with a warmonger warlord. For realz, EDIT: it takes less thought than playing an actual warlord . And if it is purist or faithless - dude, there's s**t lying all over the floor, the monsters are wimps and the boss is lvl 8. How hard can it be? And how much harder than anything else you could be doing?

Every time PQI sends you to hobblers it's like being handed 500-ish gold for doing nothing. Every run of hobblers that isn't PQI is like throwing away 500 that should've been yours. Even if you're not doing a speedrun - this whole idea came from me doing it like that with just hobblers 3 profiles in a row, and thinking, hmmm, this is what I should've done with 5-6 other dungeons too!

So if you can reach PQI with your 7-8 easiest dungeons as untouched as possible and do them throught PQI/Flaming, thats around 100 000 gold right there (if you only do them PQI, for flaming runs you can get more). Hobblers alone is worth around 12 000+ cleared with PQI/flame (not sure if it can flame) and 0 without. And the effort expected is laughable.

EDIT: There's another factor to consider - the purpose of this isn't to GRIND gold. The purpose is to AVOID grinding gold, and play the game for completion. But if unlocking the PQI first lets you mix it up and pick up good money along with the completion, and you need the money for lockers, then this is the most reasonable thing to do. It's just tacking on bonus gold on every run you do, and having a huge pool of potential runs, instead of reaching that point with a more limited number of runs available. And it's for people who want to replay everything, just in a manner that let's them get their locker slots back easier.

Lujo wrote:? Eh, what? You can prep any god for 10 gold. As long as the badge isn't purist or faithless, that alone is gong to win it for you in a very short order. You can prep GG and win with a warmonger warlord. For realz, EDIT: it takes less thought than playing an actual warlord . And if it is purist or faithless - dude, there's s**t lying all over the floor, the monsters are wimps and the boss is lvl 8. How hard can it be? And how much harder than anything else you could be doing?

Obviously Hobbler's Hold is a joke, but I was talking about PQIs in general.

Every time PQI sends you to hobblers it's like being handed 500-ish gold for doing nothing.

I did something similar with my post-beta profile, with the further restriction that every run has to contribute to completion in some way. It's important to snag PQI-unfriendly badges like Warmonger during burning dungeon runs, and to snag Purist during PQI runs so that it doesn't screw up Bet on Boss.

@Wargasm: You need an Alchemist shop before the Tinker starts showing up. The Alchemist requires the Philosopher's Stone, which I think starts spawning after the second Bezar upgrade.

See, that's perfect. That should be on the wiki; each class, building, alchemist potion, witch potion, et cetera should have a "requirement tree" on it. The complexity of the unlocks has got to be one of the most daunting things about the game. I mean, yeah, it's possible to just unlock things whenever as you stumble upon them and in the long run it probably wouldn't hurt much, but if the wiki had stuff like that mapped out, it would be much easier to do projects like this.

On a side note, has anyone been trying to recruit anyone from the Steam forum over here? There might be some new blood who know a lot about wiki editing and might be willing to do a bunch if they have the info.